Confusion by Twitter Following Limits

Twitter does not limit the number of humans that can follow you. Limits have been imposed on the number of citizens that you can follow. These following limits are not fixed - they are as low as 2,000 for some users but much higher (over 10,000) for other users.



Twitterers including @BarackObama, @JasonCalacanis, @Scobleizer, @chrispirillo, @guykawasaki, @twitlive, @bloggersblog (my account), @chrisbrogan and many others follow by 10,000 folks. One user named @oozzl is following by 160,000 society. The fact that it varies from user to user is confusing but it is apparently intentionally confusing on Twitter’s part so that the spammers they are fighting don’t know precisely what they are up to. Aswrites here there is no magic number. It’s unclear whether that strategy will work effectively - as Online Media Cultist notes spammers that find themselves hitting a limt could simply spawn new accounts. that is a problem but fortunately blogs like TwitSpam.org have been doing a great job of pointing out some of these spammers spawning multiple accounts.



that new limit caused confusion when some blog posts earlier today (and some tweets on Twitter) incorrectly said thathad limited the number of citizens that can follow you to 2,000. A great post here on StopSpam provides a summary of today’s confusion. Twitter’s Evan Williams had to step in at one point and tweet a correction to a post made

by Om Malik. You can see the small blogstorm that erupted overfollow limits here on Techmeme.



A post on TechCrunch asks how many citizens can a Twitterer seriously keep track of anyway? Loic Le Meur provides some answers in this post. Following a large number of folks was a lot more useful before Tweet search engines like Summize (nowsearch) emerged. Now you can keep up-to-date on a breaking news subject with a quick Summize search. Still, there is advantage to having breaking news come instantly at you whether you are in the knowledge business. Following a large number of society means you may be more likely to see the data when it first happens.



David Risley blogs that maybecould charge users that want to follow more than the limit allows. That’s a possibility butcould probably manufacture a lot more money simply by accepting advertising such a featuredsection that would seem on everyone’sbar. that would drive traffic to individualaccounts and likely help them obtain followers. Facebook does something similar with its Facebook pages. There’s a lot of avenues toward monetization thatcould take and they will probably try a variety of them at some point.



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